The Brave Officer: Exploring Mr. Reid’s Thought Experiment

The following essay will explore Thomas Reid’s famous brave officer thought experiment as it relates to Locke’s theory of personal identity. The essay will first offer a brief explanation of the thought experiment and it’s consequences in regards to Locke’s theory. Having established Reid’s objections to Locke’s theory, this essay will then examine a response to Reid’s objections and problems that such a response might create.
Reid’s thought experiment begins by supposing that their exists an officer that preformed a brave act, that the same officer had been beaten as a child for stealing, and that later in life the same officer was made a general. The thought experiment continues when Reid considers the possibility that the officer that preformed the brave act remembered the fact that he had been beaten as a child, the general remembered the brave act he committed as an officer, and that the general had completely forgotten about the beating he received as child. The thought experiment might be reconstructed as follows: B remembers A, C remembers B, but C doesn’t remember A, given that A is the child who had been flogged, B is the brave officer, and C is the forgetful general.
If one accepts the thought experiment is possible and that a person’s identity only exists as far back one’s consciousness extends, one must naturally accept the absurd conclusion that the “…general is, and at the same time is not the same person with him who was flogged at school” (Reid, 114). Or more simply, one must accept the absurd conclusion that B=A, B=C, and C≠A. Indeed, since intuition suggests that the above thought experiment is at least conceivable, Reid asserts that the thought experiment commits those in agreement with Locke’s theory without qualification to the above-mentioned absurdity.
In his “The Problems of Personal Identity,” Perry addresses the consequences of Reid’s thought experiment by amending Locke’s theory by utilizing Quinton’s concept of an ancestral relation. Perry description of the ancestral of relation is as follows:
Take two objects, a and z, and a relation R. If there is a sequence of objects a, b, c, . . . w, x, y, z, such that a has R to b, b has R to c, and so on, until finally x has R yo y , and y has R to z, then a and z are related by the ancestral of R (17).
Perry’s makes the ancestral relation more accessible by appealing to a more concrete example based on familial relations. Perry’s example explains that while his great-grandfather is obviously not his parent, Perry and his grandfather are ancestrally related because his grandfather was the father of Perry’s father. Or to use Perry’s own words the “…ancestral of the parent relation is the same as the relation ‘being an ancestor of,’ and that is where the notion of the ancestral got its name” (17).
The concept of the ancestral relation resolves Reid’s Brave Officer thought experiment. Based on the above definition of ancestral relation C and A can be said to be ancestrally related if and only if A has R to B and B has R to C, when C is the general, B is the officer, A is the child, and R=the act of remembering. Since the general remembers the officer and the officer remembers the child (A has R to B, B has R to C) then the general is ancestrally related to the child. This demonstrates that a person’s identity does not merely exist only as far back as one’s consciousness extends but rather exists as far as one consciousness extends ancestrally as well. Therefore, the child and the general are the same person despite the general’s inability to remember the child.
While a slight revision to Locke’s theory avoids the consequences of Reid’s thought experiment, a slight revision to the thought experiment creates new problems. Perry names this revision the Senile General Case. In the experiment, Perry imagines that:
The senile general’s biography is just like the brave officer’s, except the senile general can remember being flogged as a child and cannot remember performing any brave deed as an officer, nor can he remember anything subsequent to his performance of the brave deed (19).
This revision creates a similar problem that existed in the Reid’s original thought experiment, namely that the general is the officer but not the child. Or demonstrated another way, C has R to A and C does not have R to B, and B has R to A. Therefore, C=A, B=A, and C≠B because C and B lack the necessary ancestral relation. Or more simply the revision again allows the general to both be and not be himself in spite of the concept of ancestral relation.